


The Choices We Make

by mayawrites95 (mayarox95)



Series: Wish Upon A Star [207]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-19 22:20:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10649211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayarox95/pseuds/mayawrites95
Summary: Snow and David love the town, but they love their daughter as well. So when they see her through the doorway, they bring her through to be raised by family.





	The Choices We Make

Emma doesn’t know what to think of the woman and man in the doorway who claim to be her parents. But she’s ten and her current set of foster parents aren’t the best people. They give her privacy, but they feed her one meal a day, and when they get angry, well let’s just say Emma tries to avoid angering them.

So she goes through the doorway to this town called Storybrooke. They explain to her that the man, her father, loves her, but to keep her safe he needs to go back to sleep. A coma, her mother calls it.

When the mayor finds them, her father fast asleep in her mother’s arms, Mary Margaret claims to have found Emma lost in the woods. And with the town surrounding them, Regina has no choice but to let Emma return to the town.

Her mother formalizes the adoption a few weeks later, and Emma has a home for the first time in her life. Mary Margaret tells her stories of Snow White and Prince Charming; tales she couldn’t find in any books. She’s hiding something, and Emma doesn’t push, but she knows how to tell when she’s being lied to.

Regina Mills doesn’t like her, and Emma isn’t all that offended by it. She has no legal grounds to force Emma to leave, Mary Margaret tells her, no matter how much she tries.

So despite being in the strange town where no one seems to age, Emma is happy. She has someone who loves her and she has a home.

They visit her father daily after school, despite it being a secret that he is her father. She’s not allowed to tell anyone, to keep them all safe, and she obliges. She’s kept secrets before, so it’s hardly anything new to her.

It’s a good life, and as she grows older, she’s grateful to her mother for rescuing her from the stream of foster homes and foster parents who prefer the cheque over the child.

She’s seventeen when she begs her mother to stop telling her fairy tales. Mary Margaret looks burdened, and at that she sits Emma down, telling her that she needs to tell her something that she hadn’t before.

Emma had tried to chalk David’s awareness when she came into the town as sleepwalking, as the others claimed it to be. And when Mary Margaret tells her about the truth; that Emma Blanchard is the Saviour, she blanches. Despite walking through a magical portal to enter Storybrooke, she can’t believe it when Mary Margaret tries to get her to believe in magic and the curse. She doesn’t know what to take of the curse on the land, or that the Mayor, who Emma dislikes, is really the Evil Queen. She’s scared, and it’s too much for her, so she does what she does best. She packs a bag and in the middle of the night she runs.

She meets Neal shortly after, and he seems normal enough, safe enough. So she runs with him for a while, before his past catches up to him. She’s behind bars before she even had the chance to come to terms that her partner abandoned her to take the fall for his crimes.

But a jail sentence isn’t the only thing she’s left with. The two lines on the pregnancy test tells her as much.

She isn’t sure why she decided to do so, but when the doctor in the hospital asks her if she wants to hold the baby, _her baby_ , she says yes. And the moment Henry is in her arms, she knows she can’t throw him to the same system she was lost in.

She gets released a week later for good behaviour, and she’s not ready to face her mother just yet. So at eighteen, she takes her child and heads off into the real world.

It’s easy to forget Storybrooke as she’s lost in the chaos of events. She’s raising Henry while working, and it’s hard to remember to send a card home that says, “Sorry I didn’t believe you when you said I was some sort of hero. Hope you’re doing well.”

Henry’s getting older each day, and she tells him some of the stories her mother told her.

Oddly enough, on the days leading up to her twenty-eighth birthday, there’s a book of fairytales that she finds on her shelves, with the stories her mother had regaled to her as a child. She’s confused at the appearance, but gives it to Henry to read.

She never expected her son to believe them, and insist on her twenty-eighth birthday that she return home.

Her mother is stunned at the sight of her, but quickly invites her and her son into Emma’s childhood home. There’s a cupcake on the table where Mary Margaret had been waiting to blow out, as she apparently had done each year since Emma’s disappearance in the hope that it would bring her home. Henry is taken with his grandmother immediately, begging for stories from her time in the Enchanted Forest. Mary Margaret is amused by it, and as she takes to telling her tales to her grandson, Emma leaves to go for a walk to clear her head.

And for the first time since Emma came to Storybrooke all those years ago, she hears the clock move, stunning her.

Apparently the stunned fisherman, Killian, is just as surprised as well. He insists that it’s never done that before, and Emma smiles knowingly as she tells him that she grew up here and is all too familiar with the static clock.

He grins at that, and asks her out for a coffee, to which Emma can’t help but agree. It’s been far too long since she’s gone on a date, and despite her hesitance in men, she deserves it. It still is her birthday after all.

They run into Regina on their way into town, who unsurprisingly is displeased to see her, reminding her just how heartbroken her mother had been upon her disappearance.  Regina asks how long she’s staying, and Emma grins, answering that she will for as long as it takes. Something is unsettling about the woman, but she shakes it off, and tries to not think of the curse as she proceeds onto her date.

She visits her father the following morning. It had been years since she had done so last, and she knows it still breaks Mary Margaret’s heart that he’s in a coma. She doesn’t know if he even is her real father, or Mary Margaret her mother, but she was the closest thing Emma ever had to a family. If the curse is indeed real, Emma needs to believe in it to be broken.

And despite the nonsense of it all, there’s a lot about Storybrooke that doesn’t add up. The fact that she got to the town through a magical doorway. That her father feel asleep moments after her appearance and hasn’t woken up since. That the Mayor hates her for no reason, and that her mother has this odd way about animals. None of the town has aged, and she would be lying if she said she didn’t see the connection between the fairy tale characters and their Storybrooke counterparts.

She believes it; she always had. It was why she ran away all those years ago. Not out of disbelief but out of fear. But she’s twenty eight years old now, and she’s tired of running. She wants to come home, and she wants her family back.

She leans in and kisses her father’s forehead, pleading for him silently to wake up, and by the burst of light that emerges, she knows the curse has been broken. Her father sits up moments later, looking stunned, but pulls her into his arms as the rest of their family rushes in. The town is stunned at the broken curse, and Regina runs. And from the smile on Killian Jones’ face, she knows he had plans on continuing their romance, post curse as well.

Their family is finally together again, her, Mary Margaret, David, and Henry. And Emma finally feels at home.

**Author's Note:**

> I know Snow and David had their reasons, but I couldn't help think about how things could have been.


End file.
